This collaboration between the Manila Observatory and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is one of the activities within the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) project at IRRI.

IRRI pursues a comprehensive research agenda on climate change and rice, which includes assessing the impacts of climate change on rice cultivars and formulating adaptation strategies through improvements in crop variety and crop management. For this purpose, good quality data on climate change scenarios are required for applying detailed crop models for selected environments.

For this project, the RCS program provided downscaled climate scenarios from global climate models for four irrigated rice-growing regions in the Philippines and in India using a regional climate model. This high-resolution data will be used by IRRI for their crop model applications.